Blockchain for Employment Law

All across the world, companies, startups, and academics are looking at implementing Blockchain into their businesses. The use cases cover supply chain, identity, banking, payment, and many others. Employment is another use case which is ripe for innovation. Using the Blockchain for employment law is the next logical step in employment law.

Blockchain for Employment: Human Resource Solution

One of the much touted use cases of the Blockchain is as an immutable ledger. In short, it is a decentralized record of things that cannot be erased. The benefits of Blockchain for employment consultants is clear when you consider:

Using the Blockchain, a prospective employer could find out what was the applicant’s last drawn salary

Using the Blockchain, a prospective employer could see the actual salary paid to the applicant

Which Blockchain for Employement Consultants?

Now that almost everyone has heard of Bitcoin, it is only natural to assume that the Blockchain that we speak of, the Blockchain for Employment, is Bitcoin.

In truth, the Blockchain is only a part of the technology behind Bitcoin. Bitcoin is one application of Blockchain. But the use cases of Blockchain are more than just Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Put another way, Blockchain is like Microsoft Windows — you can do a lot with it. Bitcoin is Microsoft Office — you can only do limited things with it. Great things, but limited in scope. In the case of Bitcoin, it is payments.

Smart Contracts and Blockchain for Employment

There are other Blockchains which have a feature called “smart contracts”. These smart contracts are programs which run on the Blockchain, and utilize the computing power of all computers connected on the network.

Using these smart contracts, another Blockchain like Ethereum (which first implemented the smart contracts feature) is able to create a decentralized application for employment. All the data provided to this decentralized application will be stored on the Blockchain.

GDPR and Blockchain for Employment

The benefit of using the Blockchain for employment is the decentralized nature of its applications. The employment data fed into the system will be forever recorded, as long as even one node of the Blockchain is still running.

However, this poses challenges due to privacy laws. One such law is the GDPR, which promises individuals the “right to be forgotten” — i.e. to have their private details removed from publicly accessible websites.

The GDPR poses a challenge to Blockchain solution providers, because data stored on the Blockchain is made available on every node that downloads the entire Blockchain. And download it, they must.

These are exciting times for employment professionals, and we look forward to developments in the space of Blockchain for employment.